Use Zoom in Adobe Photoshop CS5

Adobe Creative Suite 5 provides short cuts for Zooming in Photoshop. Images that look fine at one zoom level may look extremely bad at another. You’ll zoom in and out quite often while working on images in Photoshop. You can find menu choices for zooming on the View menu; a quicker way to zoom is to use the keyboard commands.

Zooming and Navigation Keyboard Shortcuts

Command

Windows Shortcut

Mac Shortcut

Actual size

Alt+Ctrl+0 (zero)

Command+1

Fit in window

Ctrl+0 (zero)

Command +0 (zero)

Zoom in

Ctrl++ (plus sign) or Ctrl+spacebar

Command ++ (plus sign) or Command +spacebar

Zoom out

Ctrl+– (minus) or Alt+spacebar

Command +– (minus) or Option+spacebar

Hand tool

Spacebar

Spacebar

These are some of the advantages of working with the Zoom tool:

100 percent view: Double-clicking the Zoom tool in the Tools panel gives you a 100 percent view. Do it before using filters to see a more realistic result of making changes.

Zoom marquee: Drag from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the area you want to zoom to. While you drag, a marquee appears; when you release the mouse button, the marqueed area zooms to fill the image window.

The Zoom marquee gives you much more control than just clicking the image with the Zoom tool. Zoom out again to see the entire image by pressing Ctrl+0 (Windows) or Command+0 (Mac). Doing so fits the entire image in the viewing area.

Keyboard shortcuts: If a dialog box is open and you need to reposition or zoom to a new location on an image, you can use the keyboard commands without closing the dialog box.

A new window for a different look: Choose Window→Arrange→New Window to create an additional window for the frontmost image. This technique is helpful when you want to see the entire image (say, at actual size) to see the results as a whole yet zoom in to focus on a small area of the image to do some fine-tuning.

The new window is linked dynamically to the original window so that when you make changes, the original and any other new windows created from the original are immediately updated.

Cycle through images: Press Ctrl+Tab (Windows) or Command+Tab (Mac) to cycle through open images.

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